People are Busy

I was reminded this week why I feel so strongly about the clear presentation of relevant information and simplifying search - a long-time colleague from Factiva finally admitted we will not be able to teach the world to search using Boolean logic!

This revelation hit him when he read Paul Kedrosky's blog about why structured blogging will never work. Paul’s reasoning; people are lazy!

While I agree with Paul’s conclusion, people will not put the effort into different blog formats depending upon the blog post, much the way they will not spend the time building complex Boolean queries or tagging articles with appropriate meta tags.

I do not agree with his reasoning. Some people may be lazy, but I think most are just too busy. His position about smart algorithms and technologies working behind the scenes is really the point and essential to the future of information management.

Comments

[Euan Semple]

I had always subscribed to the "people are too lazy" idea and until recently hadn't been bothered tagging even my own blog.

However with the advent of Technorati's Blogfinder I began to have a reason to put in the up front effort - discovery. If I want to increase the chances of my writing on a particular subject being found I need to start tagging it.

I can easily see a situation within big organisations where the same principle will apply. If you want people to know that you are an expert on a particular subject and afford you the power and infuence that goes with that then you'd better start tagging your stuff!

[Deima Elnatour]

This is an interesting argument about why structured blogging may not work. I do not believe that the problem has anything to do with people being lazy or busy. I believe that there is an information overload problem. Information overload will continue to be a problem especially as data collections are cultivating on the Internet. People will find ways to cope with this problem. We will eventually be reluctant to disband the use of information filtering and management tools. After all, we are trying to make sense of it all in a particular place, time and context.

[Peter Caputa]

I agree that people are lazy. And they don't like to figure new things out. But, structured data on the internet will certainly become more structured, as publishing platforms enable consumers to publish events, reviews, book lists, etc in ways that enable the information to be syndicated, sorted and searched. This capability will ultimately enable consumers to contribute structured data and they will receive greater recognition, increased traffic and increased revenue for their publishing efforts. It is just a matter of time. Algorithms will certainly not recreate the structure of the database. They can make sense of it. But, they won't recreate it altogether.

[Steven Cardinale]

I agree with people are lazy ... to a point. People will make tradeoffs with their time/money when the value they receive is worth the cost. The problem with structured blogging (or any type of community supported meta data structure) is that the entrepreneurs have come up with a cool technology but forgot the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) for the user.

Give the customer enough value and they stop being lazy and jump through hoops (the internet itself didn't start out as easy - modems, protocols, buggy software, but people were not lazy about adoption).

Keep the interface as simple as possible but not simpler, give the customer value, and you'd be surprised how quickly lazy people can move.

I just don't think we've found the customer value yet for structured blogging.

[Matthew Hurst]

The people are lazy thing is true to a certain extent. However, one is faced with the prospect of informing and controlling the tool, or working with a tool which may or may not work according to the smarts it has internally. The worse-case scenario is training a set of users to expect adhoc and specialised behaviour to the extent that a better interface can never be introduced, as Google has.

[Robyn Tippins]

Exactly. In today's rushed society, where laptops only leave the lap to be replaced by a smartphone or PDA, and follow-you-anywhere VoIP, who has time to mess with complicated search or structured blogging.

Tools have to be just that, tools... They need to be easy to pick up and so useful you can't stop using them.

ex. When I first started posting with del.icio.us, it was cool, but I gave it up until it became 'useful' to me by allowing for daily blog posting of my del.icio.us links.

It may be useful, but if it's not useful TO ME it won't get used by me.

Just my two cents...